Today’s Carpe Diem challenge was to write three haiku – one following the 5/7/5 syllable count, one following the 3/5/3 pattern and one freestyle.

5/7/5:

I hurry onwards

While my long shadow lingers

Among daffodils.

~~~

3/5/3:

Daffodils –

Stretching, my shadow

Savours them.

~~~

Freestyle:

Tempting

My lengthening shadow,

Daffodils.

~~~

(c) Jackie Le Poidevin

In this instance, I found 3/5/3 horribly restricting – I mean, “daffodil” is already 3 syllables, which doesn’t give a lot of room for manoeuvre. Of course, freestyle is easier (though not necessarily better in my case) but I always start out trying to write 5/7/5 to give me some structure and discipline, even if I ultimately break the rules. Fortunately, English is a really flexible language – add or take away a “the” or “a”, or use one of our many synonyms, and the syllable count can pretty much be whatever you want it to be – I could, for example, have replaced “daffodil” with “flower” or “lingers” with “strays” or “hurry onwards” with “hurry on” or “rush on” or even, if I was feeling really poetic and nineteenth century, “Shadow” with “shade”. It gets to a stage where it’s better to break the syllable count than use, say, “”o’er” or “e’en”, but I still like to try and stick (more or less) to the basic 5/7/5 principle initially – until I find a wording I like better.

For an example of someone who tried – and failed horribly – to follow the rules of poetry in his day, check out William McGonagall from my mum’s home town of Dundee, famously the worst poet in the English language. We had three volumes of his works when I was growing up!

Our ornamental cherries aren’t out yet, unlike Chevrefeuille’s. We’ve hidden Easter eggs wrapped in pink foil among the blossoms in the past but maybe Easter is earlier this year. It’s also my daughter’s 12th birthday today – we still have some paper fans and lanterns hanging up from her party and that’s perhaps what got me thinking about paper flowers.

For Carpe Diem: Morning prayers. I wrote this haiku back in January but I’m giving it a second outing because it seems to fit nicely with this prompt. The task was to write a haiku in the style of this one by Kala Ramesh:

Yes, today we had three amazing astronomical phenomena coinciding – the Spring equinox, a near-total eclipse of the sun and a supermoon. And thanks to the British weather, we couldn’t see a thing. Oh well, at least we didn’t go blind and there are only 11 years till the next “deep partial” eclipse.